Crush (for now the address resolves to www.3ivx.com) is the upcoming, end-all be-all video compression software from the 3ivx people that brought you Diva (which, even if the last release was more than 2 years ago, is still one of the best encoders out there for the Mac).

Alex Zavatone, the Product Manager for Crush, has released some info regarding his upcoming software on the 3ivx for Macintosh discussion board. Apparently, Crush will be optimized to handle easily the two most-requested encoding approaches : super-fast encoding with minimum quality loss, or super-high quality with as-fast-as-possible encoding. According to the screenshot he posted, in either case Crush will compress a 320×240 video file way faster than realtime :

This means that if you’re mostly concerned about speed, you should be able to encode a 1 hour and a half movie in 10 minutes. This is incredibly fast, even if you consider that he’s using a high-end 2.5GHz quad G5… If you want higher resolutions (e.g. to backup a DVD or something like that), you should still be able to get compression speeds of ~60 fps ( = full movie encoding in 45 minutes). Not bad (euphemism).